You imagine that to live in a state of extremity is necessarily to discover the truth about yourself. What you discover then is violence and emptines… - Iris Murdoch

Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

It is sometimes said, either irritably or with a certain satisfaction, that philosophy makes no progress. It is certainly true, and I think this is an abiding and not a regrettable characteristic of the discipline, that philosophy has in a sense to keep trying to return to the beginning: a thing which it is not at all easy to do.